Podcasting for reading fluency assessment

August 18, 2014

Assessing reading fluency is a very important task. Accomplishing it can be challenging for even the most experienced teachers as the time available in the classroom is not always days sufficient. As for many other time consuming tasks, technology offers a set of tools that can alleviate teacher’s work load while providing students with an exciting way of showing their progress.

In this post we will discuss a general overview of the process of creating podcast and also provide with some web tools for podcasting.

A podcast is an audio file that is hosted and shared online. There are some free audio recording software that can be used to create the audio file, among those the most popular ones are Audacity and MP3myMP3. These are very useful tools for audio files edition.

Once you have managed to create your audio file, you can use a web service like Podbean that allows you to create a free account and upload your file. From your free account you will be able to share your podcast with your social media accounts, your blog or any other mean that you prefer. The free account provides you with 50 MB of storage space.

Another web tool is PodOmatic it also allows you to upload your file and share it with the world. It is also considered the largest podcasting community.

You also have the option of sharing content with your students via podcasts, for those students that are struggling with reading you can create audio versions of texts by using web services such as VozMe where you just enter a text and it creates an MP3 version of it that you can share with your students. Odiogo also allows you to not only create audio from a text but also turning your blog into a podcast.